A plea for pleaching: Let’s see some of this beautiful sculpture pruning here

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Pleaching is an artistic tree-pruning technique that is put to good use in Europe, especially in France and Holland, but not at all here in Vancouver.

Why not?

It’s a fabulous way of creating a privacy screen without growing hedges 30 feet high. It is also a classy way to give a street, courtyard, square, boulevard or avenue an elegant, formal look.

The only explanation I can find is that nobody has thought of doing it, or perhaps it is considered too time-consuming.

Pleaching is basically pruning trees so they become pretty much a hedge on stilts ... an attractive sculptural, neatly trimmed, raised hedge-like barrier or screen.

You take a suitable tree, perhaps hornbeam, linden, field maple or beech, and plant a row of them about 12 to 15 feet apart.

Then, as they grow, you clip them and keep clipping them until they merge together into one beautiful seamless oblong shape.

I have seen this done in many places, most recently at the world famous Keukenhof garden in Holland where a row of young field maples (Acer campestre) had been neatly clipped into slender, attractive box-forms.

This technique can also be applied using large trees. In the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, for example, long avenues of giant chestnut trees have been pleached to create a superb formal, almost sculptural garden architecture with sufficient space underneath for people to sit, even have a picnic.

In Chartres, I was so fascinated by this technique I once stood for a long time and watched municipal workers pruning a square full of pleached linden trees until each one was cleanly shorn with an almost razor-sharp edge.

There is no denying that it is a time-consuming exercise. It does require skilled workers and it is probably an expensive process.

But what impressed me in Chartres was that they were doing it at all. It spoke volumes about the people’s desire for beautiful public garden spaces with elegantly clipped trees in the heart of the city.

Their decision was not based on what was easy or convenient or most cost-effective, but on what made the urban environment more beautiful and ultimately more enjoyable.

Dutch-born Lambert Vrijmoed, of Free Spirit Nursery in Langley, is an expert at pleaching, one of the few, perhaps the only person here with the knowledge and skill to perform pleaching, it being a skill he learned while working in horticulture in Holland, particularly with esteemed international designer Piet Oudolf.

Vrijmoed says pleaching was originally used in Holland as a way to create summer shade for farmhouses and in town markets for food stalls. In winter, the deciduous trees lost their leaves, allowing in sunlight.

He says pleaching requires nurseries to produce an abundant stock of trees (lindens, hornbeams and beech), although he says katsura could also be used. He says in Europe, these nurseries exist and even produce ready-to-go pleached trees.

At his nursery, Vrijmoed has pleached London plane trees on an angle to create shade for the parking lot in summer. He has also created pleached hedges out of oak and beech. The downside, for some, is that these are deciduous trees that lose their leaves in winter.

But Vrijmoed thinks local gardeners, especially landscape designers and planners, need to recognize that faded brown leaves on trees and hedges in winter are not a bad thing; they’re just a different form of beauty. Faded leaves have other benefits, he says.

“During the winter the brown leaves form a wonderful and lively patchwork of colour and texture,” he says. “Another added dimension is the sound these leaves make as they rustle and tremble in fall and winter winds. Also, birds will find refuge and shelter in these hedges. It is really a question of rethinking our esthetical point of view.”

In Denmark, pleaching has been taken one step forward with beech trees being used in super creative ways to form pleached ground covers and screens that sweep up and around buildings, making startling beautiful landscapes.

“Frankly, the shortage of skilled people here who can do this kind of work is not the only issue. There is also a lack of will on the part of planners, architects and designers to try something as creative and adventurous as this. It does require them to step up and try something new.”

There is no question that pleached trees would be a lovely addition to urban parks and downtown boulevards and squares. Another big benefit of pleached trees would also be that they don’t get in the way of overhead wires, something that caused many trees to be mutilated into half- or V-pruned specimens.

Despite our long history of cutting down trees, Canadians are surprisingly timid when it comes to taking the shears to them. Japanese and Dutch gardeners have no problem snip, snip, snipping away to keep trees down to size and in the shape they want.

In Nunspeet, about an hour from Amsterdam, at a unique garden complex designed by one of Holland’s top landscape architects, Len Goedegebuure, I recently saw a spectacularly original way of using the deciduous grey-leafed weeping willow pear (Pyrus salicifolia).

Forty or 50 saplings had been planted closely together and clipped neatly to form a curving hedge. In another spot, they were shorn crisply to form solid pillars of silver foliage. Outstanding.

Goedegebuure had also clipped rows of evenly spaced linden trees into lovely cone shapes as well as snipping boxwood into a series of rolling mounds. It was all superb use of the pruners to create striking architecturally satisfying garden forms.

My love for what I call “sculptural pruning” has now become so enthusiastic friends have started to call me a “Clip-to-maniac.”

But I am convinced we need to seriously consider the art of pleaching more vigorously and put experts like Lambert Vrijmoed to work at showing us other artistic ways of trimming trees to add interest to our parks, streetscapes and urban green spaces.

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A plea for pleaching: Let’s see some of this beautiful sculpture pruning here

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